


How They Took It

by cleverpidgeon



Category: OMORI (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Health Issues, One Shot, Post-Canon, Post-good ending, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29764626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleverpidgeon/pseuds/cleverpidgeon
Summary: Sometimes you have to trust in your friends that they'll love you after you mess up.Takes place immediately post-good ending. Contains major spoilers. Content warnings of the original game OMORI apply.
Relationships: Aubrey & Basil & Hero & Kel & Sunny (OMORI), Aubrey & Sunny (OMORI), Basil & Sunny (OMORI), Hero & Sunny (OMORI), Kel & Sunny (OMORI)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 71





	How They Took It

The first to react was KEL.

First is a relative term. It took everyone time to do something that wasn't involuntary, like widen their eyes or quicken their pulse. But he moved the quickest of the three taking in the news. He couldn't just stand there and watch his friend heave and cry like that, like he never had before. And besides, if the nurses found out a badly-injured kid was out of bed, especially in _this_ state, a lot of questions would start to be asked. He did not have the answers to those questions. He did feel a little guilty for thinking so pragmatically. He turned his attention to the crumpled-up boy as everything sank in.

He wasn't naturally... sensitive. He'd spent the past four years busying himself with sports and school and smiles, outrunning the loss. He wasn't as close to her as her own brother. He couldn't imagine how he felt. But he could take an educated guess.

He had a brother of his own, and he loved him. It wasn't a perfect sibling relationship, because it never is, but he cared.

He cared a lot.

And if he ever accidentally hurt him, ever caused him serious pain, ever caused _his_ end — he could imagine how that might feel. And he could imagine that on the other side, big brother would love him enough to forgive him, and to know that he didn't mean it. His sister wasn't yet old enough to communicate this kind of thing to him, but he _liked_ to think she'd do the same.

That was his window into this situation. That boy loved his sister and his sister loved him. Those were the facts. Never, never, never, not in a million, billion years would she have held this against him, or even his accomplice. She'd know it was messed-up, sure, but sometimes "messed-up" is what you get when you put two 12-year-olds, accidental death and a whole load of panic together. Not everyone is lucky enough to think clearly enough to get it right. It hadn't always been emotionally easy for them _before_ what went on, let alone after she was gone. "Not getting it right" was not unlikely.

He walked up to his friend, doubled over at the foot of the bed, and slowly reached around him, and he gave him a hug.

AUBREY almost wanted her bat.

Her anger whirled around her eyes and above her head. _He_ took her from them. And then _they_ conspired to make it look like a whole different kind of tragedy. There had been four years of pain and asking why; the pain and the question remained, but the reason jumped and shifted in her gut like the twist of a dagger.

How could they do that to her? Sister to one boy, friend to the other - the sweet older girl of the group who would bake them cookies and bring along watermelon on trips to the beach. She was supposed to still be there. She was supposed to still be her almost-big-sister. She was _supposed_ to be the purple to her pink. She wasn't, and there was finally someone to blame.

They _took_ her! Little brother killed her and flower-boy strung her up. And if flower-boy thought it was bad before then he was in for a whole different world of pain now. He'd get out of the hospital and have to turn around and walk straight back in.

Or crawl.

She practically longed for the timeline where they hadn't both made it out of the la—

_The lake._

...

the lake.

...

...

The trembling of rage gave way to the quaking of a dawning fear and a newborn anxiety.

Because that's all that really separated her from them. Luck. Someone was around to save them. No-one was around to save... _her_. AUBREY was the oh-so-lucky girl who didn't commit two accidental murders at the same time.

And she tried her hardest to say weeeell, I wouldn't have faked two suicides. But try as she might she could never be _truly_ certain of that. It gnawed at the back of her brain. Standing there while those two got rescued, maybe she would've done anything not to look like a killer. The fear of being misjudged was powerful, and not rational. And it _gnawed at the back of her brain_. Maybe if they had died, she would have jumped at the chance to give up the rest of her innocence for the appearance of it.

And she was 16. They were 12 — young, shy, scared and ill-prepared little boys, in a world they didn't quite get and that didn't quite get them. In her moment of ineptitude, she had been a grown woman. Almost. She liked to think so.

...She didn't like it, but she started to understand. There was still much _discussion_ to be had, but for now, her fists began to unball and her knuckles grew a little less white.

A small, horrid, ugly light faded into view in HERO's mind. A realisation followed by the inferno of its consequences; a kind of slow-growing brightness that you would call a beautiful sunrise, until you look up and realise that it's the afterglow of a mushroom cloud. It threatened to take him.

He had already been taken by a mushroom cloud when he first lost her. It blasted him into tiny pieces, pieces that cried and stayed in bed till late and screamed in agony that they should have known something was off. But he guessed they shouldn't have known any better, because there was no better, and the pieces from four years ago were wrong, and the pieces that might emerge from explosion number two would be calling out that it was all a big lie and the matter was utterly helpless because she didn't kill herself, she _got_ killed.

They took her and they _mutilated_ her. They took her body and twisted its beauty and its meaning into a grim fiction on the end of a _jump rope_. And for _what_? To take the _heat off_?!

...

But he'd learned things in those four years. He'd learned things at college. He'd learned how to weather storms, for one.

And so he did not, for the second time, get swept away into smithereens. He didn't succumb. He felt the explosion, oh-so-keenly, its rage and heartbreak see-sawing its pressure between different parts of his brain. But it couldn't take him, because he knew things.

He knew how much she loved her little brother. And he loved her just the same. He knew that she was the kind of girl who would want him to be happy, even if it was without her. He knew that if his own siblings ever hurt, or God, killed him by accident, all he'd want to do would be to run over and tell them that it's OK, and that he loves them, and that he forgives them. He could never hold an accident against them. He loved them too much.

Now this boy, crumpled up at the end of the bed, had told them all about how he went through such great pain because of one accident, and he knew that this boy's sister would feel exactly that. The adult in the room had sworn not to give up on his friends, and he didn't intend to now.

...But what of the aftermath of that accident? Well... he wasn't training to become a psychiatrist specifically... but you got _some_ training on how to handle a patient's emotions. It didn't take full training to know that one could do strange things in a state of shock. Especially when "one" is two 12-year old boys. Whose relationship with the world had never really been easy-going in the first place. People didn't like to think that the mind could go to such strange places, but it could, and it would. And it did...

Oh, God. They were just 12... They were just 12... They didn't deserve this. What a blow to growing souls. And how hard they'd had to try on their own, for four years.

...They couldn't be alone again. Not anymore.

He knew his resolve. He cared about those boys, like she did when she was here, and he would love them and try to help heal them; for their own sakes, and because really, it would be the truest act of remembrance of his lost soulmate, and his love for her, that he could ever give.

BASIL slept through the confession. Which was best for him, really; he probably wouldn't have coped that well with the truth spilling out around him. But he woke up a little while later, and SUNNY was there. And SOMETHING else was there, too... but then it wasn't. For either of them. And they gave each other warm little looks, meek, but warm, and it was just the two of them. Nothing behind his friend — nothing surrounding him. He, like his best friend, could breathe a little lighter.

SOMEWHERE up there, MARI looked down at her little brother, tears forming in her eyes; she felt all their love somewhere deep within her core, she felt something big and glowing and wonderful and bright, and she smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first piece of fanfiction i've ever written! it's also the first piece of creative writing i've done in many years. i'm pleased with how it turned out. :)
> 
> ultimately i think the gang would forgive sunny and basil. i hope the reasons why i think this have come through for each character in their own section. maybe it's part wishful thinking, maybe it's part what i want to think would happen, but i think deep down in me somewhere i do believe they would. i forgive them.
> 
> it wasn't my plan at the beginning of this, but somewhere during aubrey's section i started writing in different styles for each of them - aubrey's is more off-the-cuff, hero's is deliberately more poetic and metaphorical. this doesn't come through for kel so much, since i hadn't had the idea when i wrote his part. having looked back over it, i still think it's got a little bit of a kel styling to it, though - it's a little more distracted, and it tries to take the weight off a bit more.
> 
> something i also tried to do was only mention each character's name once. i felt it would give the names extra weight when they came about. this meant i had to figure out some interesting phrasing in order to make it clear who i was referring to sometimes, but i hope it works out and is at least fairly clear.
> 
> OMORI impacted me a great deal, and i needed to give back to it in some way. i've done some pixel art that i put on twitter, but i needed to do this, too. maybe i'll write more in the future? i have a few ideas. maybe i'll write some ooey-gooey sugary-sweet mushy-gushy sunbrey fluff lol (or sunburn? if anyone wants to tell me why that's a name for that ship i'd appreciate it 'cause idk hehe). or maybe hero/mari stuff, to give them what they deserved.
> 
> i guess we'll see where it goes. thanks for reading. <3


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